Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward Kindle Edition

OK. I admit I'm going out on a limb, but I've already found a contender for my Top-10 book list for 2011. The chapter titles are powerful enough. The actual chapters are pure dynamite. Example:
--The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: Identifying Which Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust (Chapter 7)
--Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or Superfluous (Chapter 2)
--When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason (Chapter 4)
--Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What Is Depleting Your Resources (Chapter 13)

Dr. Henry Cloud, a leadership coach to CEOs and business executives, and a clinical psychologist, has introduced a new term into the leadership lexicon: the pruning moment.

He defines the pruning moment as "that clarity of enlightenment when we become responsible for making the decision to own the vision or not. If we own it, we have to prune. If we don't, we have decided to own the other vision, the one we called average. It is a moment of truth that we encounter almost every day in many, many decisions."

Cloud melds the personal and the professional in this pruning manual of memorable stories and principles and shows why they must go hand-in-hand--and why lack of character on the personal side is often the unseen obstacle to "necessary endings" on the business side.

"Getting to the next level," Cloud writes, "always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on." He takes Peter Drucker's "planned abandonment" and "sloughing off yesterday" themes (see my Results Bucket chapter) and delivers a detailed road map for arriving at your preferred destination.

Necessary endings, he adds, "are the reason you are not married to your prom date nor still working in your first job." Leaders get that, so what's new and fresh? How about his list of the 11 reasons why leaders and managers avoid necessary endings? Here are just four of the preferred avoidance strategies:
--"We are afraid of the unknown."
--"We do not possess the skills to execute the ending."
--"We have had too many and too painful endings in our own personal history, so we avoid another one."
--"We do not learn from them, so we repeat the same mistakes over and over."

If your gut says it's time to end a relationship, help an employee exit, dismount a dead horse, say farewell to a sacred cow, or drop a loser program, product or service, this just-in-time pruning book will show you how.

Cloud uses a simple rose bush illustration to explain the pruning process. Pruning is "removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous." It's also a process of "proactive endings." He coaches leaders to prune in three categories (think rose bushes):
1) Prune healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones.
2) Prune sick branches that are not going to get well.
3) Prune dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to survive.
He likes Jack Welch's view that a leader must discern whether a business or a division needs to be fixed, closed or sold.

"All of your precious resources--time, energy, talent, passion, money--should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable and are indispensable."

"Leaders by nature," Cloud adds, "are often optimistic and hopeful, but if you do not have some criteria by which you distinguish optimism from false hope, you will not get the benefits of pruning. Sometimes the best thing a leader can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying."

Then, this zinger: "Wise people know when to quit."

And effective leaders know when to ask people to exit. Commenting on Welch's "Neutron Jack" style of pruning the bottom 10 percent of employees each year," Cloud nudges the timid leader with this wisdom: "And I can understand why many people were upset with a fixed strategy like that for firing employees. But I do believe that there is some number of people in every organization and every life who will be routinely `let go' if leadership is doing its stewardship job."

Cloud also delivers fresh ideas in other management buckets, including three practical questions to ask in the Meetings Bucket. If a routine meeting is "sick and not getting well," he offers this example: "We have tried repeatedly to use these times for forecasting, and it just never works. We can't get the information we need as the discussion progresses, and even though we have tried, it is confusing and a waste. Let's stop using this meeting to do that."

I underlined a lot of pages in this book. It's filled with gems...I mean, it's a bouquet of roses that will brighten your day and lengthen your career.

I generally don't have time to read books twice, but this book was an exception for me. I greatly enjoy Henry Cloud as an author and have read many of his books. His style is easy to read and I mostly appreciate his insight and the way he looks at life. I'm one that clings to situations and people much, much longer than is healthy. I appreciate his insight that we need to let go of certain things to make room for better things. He takes you step by step through deciding what you ought to let go of and how to do it with graciousness. The author definitely has a Christian outlook on life, which I appreciate, and when I read his books I feel more confident to move forward with life. I recommend these books to my family and friends.

We have a finite amount of energy, time and money available. What is spent on the wrong things cannot be spent on the right ones.
Gardeners get this: They understand the need to remove diseased, overmature, or unwanted portions from the rose bush. They know that pruning encourages denser growth and more profuse flowering by concentrating the plant's energy on continued flower production.
Part of the lifecycle of plants is the need for pruning. Part of the lifecycle of people and organizations is the need for pruning. Pruning applies to big issues like ending relationships with people and projects, and small ones like scrapping parts of the Monday morning meeting agenda that no longer add value. More important issues cannot be added to the time tight agenda unless other items are removed.
Clouds’ book, Necessary Endings, is a guide to ending relationships that are no longer working, investments that are not performing, so we can use the finite amounts of time, energy and money that we have for what can work. To do that effectively we need to be clear what we are dealing with so we do not end what we should persevere with and not persevere with what we should end.
A useful rule of thumb is his distinction between “hoping” and “wishing.” Hoping is when the expectation of an improvement in staff productivity or an investment returns is based on sound evidence or reasoning. In contrast, wishing is the baseless expectation of improvement of the situation.
Jack Welch was a legendary pruner. He pruned any companies that were not number one or number two in their industries or on their way to becoming number one or number two. He instructed his managers to spoil the top 20% of their staff, take care for “solid” 70% and fire the bottom 10%. Both the business and the staff were stronger for this as evidenced by GE’s spectacular results during his twenty year tenure as Chairman and CEO.
Cost cutting should not be confused with pruning. Pruning is strategic, cost cutting often results in fewer people required to do more with less, hardly a clever strategic move.
Cloud, a clinical psychologist, explores the many emotional traps that prevent us from ending what is necessary. They range from the mistaken belief that “winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win” to the feeling that “we may be in hell, but at least we know every street.” Even when there is no longer any reason to believe that the project, employee, relationship or partnership will ever come right people decline to effect the necessary ending. This feels preferable to being labeled the “bad guy” by oneself or others.
There are books for gardeners on how to prune the roses. Executed competently, you get great blooms and done purely or not at all, you will have ungainly, leggy growth with bare branches at the base. Necessary Endings is probably the business equivalent.
The good times can not start until the bad times end.

Readability Light --+-- Serious
Insights High -+--- Low
Practical High +---- Low

Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

I thought this was a terrific book, however I really wasn't looking for a book to save my business. I was looking for a book to save myself. I thought the extensive business advice merited its own book, separate from the relational advice.